Views in brief
Time for a change in SEIU
As a recent resident of California, and a former (briefly) paid organizer for the Service Employees International Union--someone badly burned by Local 1021 in particular--I'm very happy to read that things are changing, at least in California ("Sweeping victory for SEIU reformers").
Andy Stern is a chump, a friend of the bosses and a skunk, and it's heartening to see that the Local 1021 in particular is getting the "Sternness" shaken out of it by bottom-up reformers. The purple could use a new standard bearer, in my opinion, and this looks like a great chance for the organization to change hands!
Zac D., Fairfax, Va.
Justice for Kevin Kaigler
REGARDING "TRAGEDY in St. Tammany": Kevin Kaigler was a high school friend of mine. I am glad you all published this article. The world should know of social injustices that take place.
Things will never change if they are not informed. Hopefully, people will open their eyes and their hearts, and address issues like these. We the people believe in justice, and not "just-us."
Hasan Harrell, Slidell, La.
The right's assault on campus
REGARDING "A climate of campus racism": Sadly campus racism is not limited to the United States of America, nor is the brutality of the right limited toward people of color or ethnic minorities. Women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people also suffer abuse at the hands of these right-wing thugs. It is telling that these brutes tend to be the male scions of the bourgeoisie and rancher aristocracy.
In Australia, women delegates to the National Union of Students are issued rape whistles due to the proclivity of right-wing delegates to drunkenness and sexual assault. This year, whistles were deliberately withheld from socialist women delegates, who bear the brunt of abuse. On campus, people of Arabic or Muslim descent are often singled out for abuse or ridicule.
During student union elections, right-wingers draped in flags follow activists and target women, Arabs and out-of-the-closet LGBTI people. If you are different, they will punish you.
Many, if not most, of these thugs are the richest people on campus: they are the ruling class in training. The homophobia, racism and callous indifference to suffering required to steer empires of industry are fully inculcated in youth. Thus, student bigots in each nation target the pet hates of their own ruling classes--be they migrant, Black, Latino or LGBTI people.
Michael, Melbourne, Australia
Whose right to sexual "freedom"?
REGARDING "YOUTH, sexuality and the left": Thank you, for a clear and thoughtful necessary riposte to David Thorstad. How sad, to hear such stuff from someone who claims to be a leftist, someone who sees themselves as for some kind of liberation.
Another even sadder chord was struck here, too. Thorstad is claiming for gay men the right enjoyed for centuries by heterosexual men--access to sex objects, no matter how young.
Marx chided the fearful bourgeois, saying in the Communist Manifesto:
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
These bourgeois suffered from such lack of imagination they could only see women as property they'd be compelled to share. Thorstad has a similar narrow vision. He imagines that children's freedom means his access to them, that men's rights over girls should expand to cover boys, too. Rosa Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution isn't the only book he should open.
Tina Beacock, Chicago
